


Rules

by Im_All_Teeth



Series: One-Shots: Dramione [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Originally Posted on FanFiction.Net, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-18
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2020-10-21 00:11:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20684267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Im_All_Teeth/pseuds/Im_All_Teeth
Summary: Five rules that govern Draco and Hermione's relationship and guide their life together.





	Rules

**Author's Note:**

> This was the first fanfic I ever wrote. Originally posted in December of 2010 on ff.net.

Rule 1: Accept the Unbeautiful

Draco Malfoy was not attractive in the mornings. He did not wake up quickly or with any sort of dignity. His hair stuck up on one side of his head and plastered itself to the other, making him look like a painfully asymmetrical albino rat. Conversations were limited to grunts until he managed to pull his pasty self out of bed and into the shower. After that, he was an insufferable asshole until he had consumed a morning cup of tea (he did not drink coffee). The stubble on his chin grew unevenly—suggesting that mother nature herself understood Draco Lucius Malfoy was not supposed to have a beard.

It was Hermione's habit to leave for work before Draco woke up. The motivation behind this was to retain the image of him peacefully asleep in the bed they shared, and not the image of the same person yelling at her across the kitchen about not having any sugar for his tea (after he'd already added sugar to his tea), or the fact that their apartment seemed so damn cold all the time (unless it was too hot, which also merited grumbles). Even more important, he had the worst morning breath of any person she had ever met and he could not understand why she never wanted to give him a passionate kiss goodbye on the rare days he rose before she departed.

Rule 2: The Little Things Are the Only Things That Matter

Draco liked to surprise Hermione with gifts for three reasons:

Firstly, she was easy to please, never expected much, and it always came back to him in a very good way. In this, she was very unlike the women he was used to dealing with; his mother or Astoria, for instance, expected nothing less than thousand-galleon, sparkly, gifts every Christmas. Draco was a firm believer in the cost-benefit relationship between all things. While there would be much personal cost if Draco did not get his mother something large and fashionable for Christmas, there would be few benefits to complying. (His mother might deign to thank him. Astoria would never dare to stoop even that low.) With Hermione, on the other hand, he found that it mattered less the cost and rarity of the gift he gave than the emotional significance that she could extrapolate from it. After she received something of some significance, she would be in a wonderful mood for days, surprising him with kisses and smiles across the dinner table. She was always warm, but in the days after even the most trifling thing was purchased for her, she would positively glow. All she required was some thought. As he thought about her almost constantly, this wasn't very hard and thus, in her case, the cost-benefit ratio was much prettier.

Secondly, it was not difficult. He kept a list in his mind of things he knew she loved. If he purchased it from Flourish and Blott's, she would enjoy it. If it smelled good, tasted good, or could be related to Gryffindor or S.P.E.W., it would probably be a safe bet. "It doesn't really matter what you get me," she said to him once, back when he was still trying to surprise her with jewelry. "Just knowing that you thought about me when I wasn't there makes me happy." He didn't doubt this. He could probably buy her mandrake root or hippogriff dung and she would be grateful, but a Malfoy did nothing by half.

Thirdly, he genuinely enjoyed making her happy. When she smiled, her nose wrinkled and her dark eyes crinkled into two half-moons. It wasn't her prettiest face, but it was his favorite. He liked that she didn't smile like that for other people, that her happy-gift-getting face was just for him. He liked that she always made a fuss about putting flowers in highly visible locations and he liked how proud she was when she announced to Ginny or Harry or whoever asked that the flowers were "from Draco, and aren't they lovely?" He liked the satisfied tone of her voice. But mostly, he liked her smile.

Rule 3: No One Said It Would Be Easy.

There were nights when she would wake up screaming, clawing at her face and arms, her eyes wild with terror and the memory of pain, the words I don't know anything! tripping over her tongue. He would cradle her like a baby in his arms until she shook herself back to sleep, her small hands balled into fists in the knotted and sweat-soaked sheets, her dark, damp hair everywhere. On these nights, he would not fall asleep – if at all – until after the sun opened its ugly orange eye on the horizon, and he hated himself.

He did not regret the war. More specifically, he did not regret the part he played in the war. He knew he should, logically. If the outcome of the war had been different, and he and his family had been on the winning side, he knew that he would not be where he was today, that Hermione would not be with him. But there was some wall keeping him from regretting it all; like if he conceded that he had been wrong, then his entire life would come unraveled and he would be nothing but a husk. A few years back, after a failed attempt at escape, his father had been kissed by a dementor. Draco imagined that that was what regret looked like his father's hollowed-out eyes.

Even though he didn't regret the war, he hated it. Some days, he hated it so much that he wasn't sure that anything would ever be right. The mark on his left arm ached from time to time. He kept it hidden, most days, with an enchanted second-skin bandage, which made the skin on his arm look flawless and new. He knew some Death Eaters who had had the mark removed, and others who still wore theirs proudly. All of them said it hurt sometimes, like a toothache under the skin. The mark itself never moved; the snake never waggled the way it did when The Dark Lord touched them. But it did hurt. And he hated it.

More than anything, he hated Bellatrix Lestrange. He could not bring himself to regret anything that he did during the war, but that did not stop him from regretting what he did not do to help Hermione while his aunt prodded her memory and in the process, broke something irreparable and irreplaceable. It was this event that Hermione had nightmares about, and it was these nightmares that had eventually pulled her away from Weasley, and probably in some way had led her to Draco. Ron was apparently ill-equipped to deal with the emotional after-effects of the war. After that first year of peace, the events of the war-years caught up with her. She was afraid to be left alone, couldn't make decisions, and lost her job. Then the nightmares started with an intensity that frightened both halves of the young couple. Ron got angry that he couldn't protect her from the things in her mind, but he failed to understand why she couldn't control them. Of course, the war had not been kinder to him – he had lost so many people he loved, had faced death and bodily harm even more than she or Harry had – but the war for him was a physical thing – like a rainstorm or earthquake – and now it was like a closed book. They didn't last a second year, and no one who knew them very well was surprised.

A short time after that, Hermione checked herself into St. Mungo's, which was actually where she and Draco met again. He had landed himself in the mental ward of St. Mungo's after a six-month stay at Azkaban left him with some nasty mental baggage. He didn't like to talk about it, but was always quick to point out that no, he hadn't gone to Azkaban because of Death Eater activities, but for a completely (well, mostly completely) separate offense.

It surprised him how willing she was to talk to him after everything he had done to her, but apparently it was hard to find people who knew exactly what the Death Eaters did to people. For most of the wizarding world, according to Hermione, the war had been removed; romanticized, almost, and as a war hero, she was expected to be stronger than that. Sympathy apparently isn't forthcoming for the deified in a society. He was just happy to have someone to talk to, the mark on his arm a personal scarlet letter, marking him as a Judas; a wolf among the lambs; a bogeyman in the wizarding world. They talked a lot about Bellatrix at first, or about how their lives had gone since the war ended, but as life improved for both of them, their conversations began to grow more varied. Then they talked about books and the news. They did not start dating until a year or two later after they were safely away from all of that, and even still things were not easy. There were days when he caught her looking at him sideways through her eyelashes, almost like she was unsure of who he was or how he got there. Sometimes he wasn't sure, either. After all, not even love can erase an upbringing in which the purity of blood was worth more than all the gold in Gringots.

Now he was the one to hold her when the nightmares returned. They were less frequent than they had been, but they still came, and when they did, Draco would hold her until she fell asleep again, and then he would watch her sleep until the sun came up. She didn't know he did this. She didn't know that on those nights he would look at the tattoo on his arm and would wish that it belonged to someone else. She didn't know that even though he did all this, he could never ever regret anything that led them to be together. This may have been selfish or unkind, but if not for the bushy-haired woman to come home to, he was not sure there would be any point in going anywhere. She did not know any of this, and he felt no need to change that.

Rule 4: Know When A Battle Is Lost. Know Which Side You're On.

There are some things that Hermione will never fully understand, and she's accepted this and has stopped trying to figure it out. There are some things that are so wrong that they cannot be fixed.

Draco has not been home in seven years and Hermione does not need to ask to know why. Astoria still lives there with Narcissa, even though she and Draco have been separated for almost a decade now. Sometimes, Hermione wonders what life would be like if she were a jealous woman; if she and Draco would be together at all. She tries not to think about it. She knows, logically, that the way pureblood society is set up, he couldn't marry her even if he wanted to. Logically, he can't divorce Astoria because the Malfoys were ruined after the war, like so many other pureblood families who had allied themselves with the dark lord, and it was now those who hadn't gotten their hands dirty during the war who had inherited the wizarding world. Logically, it would kill his parents if he divorced Mrs. Malfoy nee Greengrass for a mudblood. Logically, this shouldn't bother her, since Draco had not been home in seven years since he loves her since she knows he would never leave her. Logically, she knows better than to let this destroy her from the inside out – that she would never give Naricssa or any of those other silly aristocratic morons the satisfaction of knowing that it was their stupid little games of marriage that destroyed her. Logically, she knows better. She really does.

Rule 5: Life Will Continue

And he is good for her.


End file.
